


To Mask On

by Carmenlire



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alec Lightwood Deserves Nice Things, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Pre-Canon, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 23:07:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17272877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmenlire/pseuds/Carmenlire
Summary: The Institute is suffocating. Every time that he strides down its halls or lingers in the kitchen, he feels another piece of himself die. He can’t bury the niggling sense of guilt, the constant low-level fear that puts him on edge. He feels like he’s living a lie, like he’s hiding and it’s tearing him apart inside.No one knows his secret. No one can know and just the thought of someone finding out turns his gut to water.





	To Mask On

_I’m not who you think I am_.

Alec stands straight and tall, shoulders back, in the training room as Maryse tears into him for missing a shot.

Instead of the bullseye, he’d hit the innermost ring.

A part of him wants to shrivel back under her relentless ire. There’s still a piece of him-- always will be, he supposes morosely-- that craves her approval like the child he was so long ago.

Alec barely remembers those days. They’ve grown hazy, overshadowed with newer memories of reprimands and absence and an overwhelming feeling like he can’t ever do anything quite right.

As his mother dresses him down, Alec almost shrinks back under the onslaught. He’s gotten good at pretending he’s an impenetrable wall, though, so he maintains his soldier’s stance and looks attentive while his thoughts are preoccupied.

He’s so fucking tired most days that getting out of bed seems like too much effort. He’s eighteen and newly graduated from the academy and most days he feels like a child, lost and aimless.

Oh, he knows what path his life will follow. He has a few years out on the field before he’ll take over as Head of the Institute. Around the same time, presumably, he’ll be expected to find a wife and have a couple of kids and perpetuate the Lightwood line for another generation.

Just the thought makes him sick, makes him feel like his throat is coated in ash.

No one sees Alec. No one takes into consideration what he wants, what he wants so much sometimes that it steals his breath.

The truth is, Alec hates it here. Sometimes he wonders why he couldn’t have been born a goddamn mundane. He could live a frightfully dull life as a professor or maybe even a doctor and be free to live as he wanted.

Maybe if he was a professor no one would care that he was gay. Maybe if he wasn’t the heir to the Lightwood Legacy, he wouldn’t feel like this.

The Institute is suffocating. Every time that he strides down its halls or lingers in the kitchen, he feels another piece of himself die. He can’t bury the niggling sense of guilt, the constant low-level fear that puts him on edge.

He feels like he’s living a lie, like he’s hiding and it’s tearing him apart inside.

No one knows his secret. No one can know and just the thought of someone finding out turns his gut to water.

Alec’s gay. Alec doesn’t dream of finding a perfect wife in Idris, would rather put an arrow through his goddamn heart than try to love a woman and settle down with her for whatever time Raziel’s seen fit to give him.

It’s a secret he’ll take to his fucking grave, though, and Angel willing, Alec will be so much dust in the City of Bones before anyone ever finds out that he wasn't the perfect shadowhunter.

Life is hard enough as it is. Alec can’t imagine what it would be like if he told anyone. He could kiss his career trajectory goodbye and maybe even his runes. Izzy and Jace might try their best but Alec can never quite convince himself that everything would turn out perfectly well if he told them.

He can never silence the doubt that maybe they wouldn’t accept him after all.

And as Alec stares impassively ahead as Maryse continues to berate him, Alec can’t even fathom how the woman in front of him would react.

Maryse has been ice cold for as long as Alec can remember. He can’t help but feel like he should have some memories of a tender mother but he comes up infuriatingly blank any time he tries to recall a softer version of Maryse.

In a perfect world, Alec would be confidently gay. He would love whomever he wants unabashedly. He would find a man and be unafraid to declare that this was it-- this was the person he wanted to spend his forever with.

Alec’s always been a little too sentimental for his own good-- a little too stuck in his head-- and he’s spent far more time than he’ll ever admit dreaming of his perfect ending.

He doesn’t want a lot. At least, it doesn’t seem like it. If he was straight, then his dreams would be almost too simple.

All he wants is a successful career and a man to love. He’s dreamed of meeting someone. Sometimes it’s easy. A Clave envoy visits and it’s love at first sight. Sometimes he thinks of more outlandish scenarios-- meeting on the subway, at a coffee shop, at that bar Alec goes to when he can’t quite shut his thoughts off.

No, Alec muses as he tries to look appropriately chastised. His dreams are simple but out of reach all the same. There are no gay people in Idris and they sure as hell don’t have Maryse Lightwood for a mother.

His mother is a hard woman, frigid, and her ambition is enough for twelve men. Every time Alec looks at her, he wonders what she’d do if she knew.

Sometimes the words are on the tip of his tongue and he bites them back so hard his tongue bleeds.

No one knows him and Alec wonders who would be left standing beside him if his secret was out-- or if he’d be left standing alone amidst his own private destruction.

The Institute is too much on the best of days. It strangles the life out of him and every hour that he has to hide who he is, he feels like he’s dying. His soul is weeping and sometimes he gives a fleeting thought to packing his bags and walking out.

A shadowhunter fleeing into the shadows. It’s freeing, if unrealistic enough to make him annoyed at himself.

Alec doesn’t feel like he belongs. He feels like an interloper wherever he goes and the only time he feels alive is when he’s out on patrol, killing demons, or training. When he’s so totally focused on something else, blood pounding in his ears and sweat dripping into his eyes, there’s no room to think. It’s like Alec’s very soul takes a deep breath and he lives for those times.

It’s the in between spaces that makes him want to curl up and disappear.

Alec comes to as Maryse’s tirade ends with an abrupt dismissal. He nods once before turning on his heel and goes to his room.

He showers and falls into bed. It’s turned to night and as the streetlamp casts shadows over his bedroom, Alec stares up at the ceiling.

No, he can’t tell anyone. It feels like he’s wearing a mask, all the time, and it’s cracked. The cracks are imperceptible but it feels like there are _so many of them_ that you can almost see the man underneath.

It’s getting harder and harder for Alec to care, though. He wonders if people would notice if he lifted it, broke it a little more. People see what they want to see and sometimes Alec’s so goddamn surprised at heteronormative explanations that he can’t speak.

People wonder why the eldest Lightwood is never linked to any Idris debutante. They always chalk it up to being a devoted student and earnest leader.

Alec’s total apathy for his future, his distinct lack of desire to have kids or a wife is explained away because he’s _a man_. He’ll be able to depend on his wife to take care of the kids while he fucks off Angel knows where. He’s been reassured several times with a clap on his back and a wink that having kids is really no different than not having kids. As long as there’s a women around, he’ll be free to continue on with his _pursuits_.

The old windbags who told him that always leave Alec feeling unclean and unbearably sorry for their miserable wives.

As Alec listens to the ticking clock, he thinks that he’d love kids one day as long as he didn’t have to have a wife. Settling down with a man and raising a pack of kids seems idyllic in its own way. Alec’s always loved kids and the thought of building his own family his own way fills him with a searing grief for the life he’ll never live.

Alec falls asleep a little while later. It’s unforgivably early but he’s too tired to care. Sometimes, he thinks that he could sleep for days and still wake up tired.

Nothing ever changes and every day, Alec wakes up and puts his mask on. It’s banged up and bruised but it’s all that’s standing between him and devastation.

Alec will wear that goddamn mask until he’s dead. There’s no other option and he refuses to be another stain on the Lightwood name, can’t stand the thought of giving his mother and all the bastards in Idris so much ammunition against him.

Alec dreams and his dreams are frighteningly pedestrian. He dreams of a man that’s as kind as he is handsome with a shining intellect and affectionate nature.

It’s not much but it’s everything to Alec.

He’ll wake up in the morning and go through the motions, cringing every time someone says something that shows their painful ignorance. He’ll feel one breath away from suffocating and work out his pent up frustration in the training room and then later on during patrol.

He’ll have the vague memories of his dreams though, and those brief flashes of a man to love keep Alec fighting every day. He fights against himself and the guilt that he’s lying to everyone he knows, the overwhelming fear of the consequences should he stop.

He fights the mask but always loses and hopes that one day-- _please, Christ_ \-- he won’t have to fight so hard, won’t feel stinging regret every goddamn day for the life he’s wasting, wishing it to go by faster-- or stop going by at all.

 

It’s five years later when Alec rips his mask off irrevocably. Its cracks have turned into chasms and for the first time in his life, Alec takes a greedy gulp of air, feels almost giddy as the noose loosens around his neck as his fingers tighten on Magnus’s lapels.

Alec kisses him and it feels like homecoming. 

It’s euphoria.

It’s everything.

It’s not perfect but Alec realizes something he’s always suspected. Perfection is what you make of it and he can’t let the Clave or his parents ruin this, not when he’s waited so long for everything to be out in the open.

 

A few months later when his family crumbles further and Maryse starts to change, to become the mother he always wished for, Alec welcomes her with open arms.

When she comes over for dinner one night and thanks Magnus, the man she was always so vitriolic against, Alec feels a piece of him fall into place with the quietest of clicks.

He looks between his boyfriend and his mother and feels like he’s finally found his place.

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on tumblr or twitter @carmenlire!


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